Whats my next upgrade?

[Gordon B]

Hi all,

Currently rocking an i7-7700k with a Z270E board. Starting to get a bit long in the tooth now. What's a decent middle of the road upgrade to see me through the next few years?

My 2070Super and 32G of RAM should be OK for a while yet so its only really a chip and board I'm looking for. I'd keep the Z270E but the 7700 is the fastest chip it will take.

AMD or Intel, not fussed. Budget around £200 (assuming I can shift this board and chip for , what, £120?)

Options please

 

[Ono]

If it were me and I wanted better perfomance and quality of life now for gaming etc I would upgrade storage to SSDs (if you are still on HDD).

Or I would stick with this and save up more (£600 or so) for a new mobo/cpu combo where it actually makes a difference - probably to a Ryzen based system - 5800x or something on a B550 platform.

 

[Fe_man2000]

depending on what you need the PC to do a cheaper 5600x CPU on a B550 motherboard and as Ono said maybe get a NVMe drive as thats a great way to speed up the PC in windows.

 

[thedude]

I5 11600k is going to be your best value for money upgrade.

UserBenchmark: Intel Core i5-11600K vs i7-7700K

cpu.userbenchmark.com

Other than the Intel the AMD 5 5600x is a good comparison money wise

Of course you can by a ryzen 9 or an Intel i9 but if you are gaming only probably no point

Intel Core i5-11600K vs. AMD Ryzen 5 5600 vs. Core i5-10600K

Rocket Lake is finally here and today we're checking out the new Core i5-11600K to see if it's a worthy replacement for the affordable 10600K and/or defeating...

www.techspot.com

 

[Delvey]

For £200 you'll get an 11400F and a cheap motherboard. But you won't, because as with most silicon based gaming components they are non existent. If you up your budget to £300 you'll get 5600x and a B450 motherboard (B450 is fine, it just doesn't have Gen4 PCIE for GPUS and this is the last CPU line up from AMD using AM4 supposedly).
Video comparison between the 7700k and 11400, noting that the 5600x is on par or below the Intel i5 in most games

 

[MooCow]

If you're going for a new Ryzen - you would get best performance out of it with faster RAM speeds - do you know what your 32GB sticks are at the moment that you are bringing along?

 

[Gordon B]

Thanks all, food for thought. Already got NVMe so everything else is pretty much future proofed.

I'll check the RAM and report back, the 11400f looks like a nice little performance boost though for not too much money providing I can drop on one.